Organization moves to encourage youth to vote

Mobilize Organize Vote Empower, or MOVE, is Trinity’s newest political organization on campus. It is a local, non-partisan grassroots organization that focuses on getting the youth of San Antonio out to vote and works to make sure that student voices are heard in the policy making process. It is a chapter of the larger organization, San Antonio MOVE, which began earlier this year. San Antonio MOVE is a non-profit that, according to Jessica Luhrman, co-president of the Trinity chapter, is under review of the IRS for nonprofit status.

Trinity is one of three chapters in San Antonio.

“When MOVE San Antonio started, Hannah Beck, the founder and president, started with the intention of getting a lot of youth involved,” Luhrman said. One of our primary goals is to get youth voters registered to vote. The youth vote is very underrepresented, simply because people don’t vote.”

A chapter at San Antonio College will be starting up next semester.

While the club has only been registered for about a month, there are already nine members in the Trinity organization. Meetings are held every Tuesday at 9 p.m. on the fourth floor of Lightner in the lounge, and membership dues are five dollars per month. During meetings, members talk about a wide variety of things ranging from events to voter registration tactics.

According to Luhrman, the Trinity group joined other chapters of MOVE San Antonio on Halloween night for an event called “Trick-or-voting” where members walked around neighborhood blocks and registered voters.

“Trick-or-voting is a really big event, and all the other chapters and MOVE San Antonio as a whole will be putting it on. We went to specific neighborhoods on Halloween night from 7 to 9 p.m.,” Luhrman said.

MOVE has plans to go to first year seminar classes as well and hand out voter registration cards. It is especially important to target first years, who are more likely to be unregistered.

“Everyone in the club works hard to make sure the events we put on make an impact in the community,” said Amulya Cherala, secretary.

Overall, the club hopes to empower the youth vote.

“We really want college students to be more involved in politics. We are issue-based, so we want to seek people out once primaries come up. We will be informing people about the candidates and on the issues we support and why we support them,” Luhrman said.

MOVE is a progressive group, so they support certain issues in upcoming elections. For example, the organization will be supporting a tax placed on plastic bags, with the ultimate goal of obtaining a bag ban.

“I like how politically oriented everyone in the club is, and the discussions we have on political issues that we find need to be addressed are insightful and interesting,” Cherala said.

Senior Judith Siron is intrigued by the organization and is considering joining.

“I would be interested in joining MOVE because I think it is very important. Voting is an inherent freedom, and students should take advantage of this,” Siron said.

Those in the Trinity community should consider MOVE if they are interested in getting more connected to local politics and becoming more involved in the political system and democracy as a whole.

“MOVE is a great way to learn about what is going on in the San Antonio political scene and become a part of empowering the youth,” Cherala said.